Okay. I know a lot of fundies.
Some even believe in the missing day theory.
I need some easy-to-understand reasons for why God didn’t create the world and people in 6 days.
No molecular biology explanations.
Simple stuff.
Also, reasons why Noahs Ark couldn’t have happened.
I hope this is the right forum.
And thanks.
Paleontologists have shown the slow evolution of creatures on earth. Fundies say that the world was created in the year 4004 BC, based on a bible passage. Carbon dating and other evidence establishes that Earth is 4.5 billion years old and astronomers have shown that the Universe is around 13 billion years old. Since we’re able to see out in space with new telescopes, etc., we can see as far away as would take light over 10 billion years to reach us.
So, it depends upon how you define “days.” Especially since there would have been no days until the Earth and he sun came into existence.
Also, who said Noah’s ark couldn’t happen?
Good luck in your quest. I’m assuming you are not a fundie, just trying to enlighten a few of them. I think your task will be a self defeating one. Simplifying complex processes is how many fundies justify their position. Who had the sig that said more (paraphrased) you can’t use logic and reason to argue against a position that does not. If a fundie says that evolution violates the second law of thermodynamics the only think I can say is they don’t understand the processes or correct application of the second law. That’s not going to get anywhere with a Jack Chick style fundie.
Padeye
The Christian and science guy
(though not a Christian Science guy, I’m Lutheran)
who can find no reason why both shouldn’t see eye to eye
To be honest, since you are dealing with people’s beliefs rather than their logic then simple reasons are a waste of breath. Their teachers have already supplied pat answers to our simpler objections, like “Then where did all the water go?” It takes a leap of faith of its own to learn to apply Occam’s razor and to ask what the simplest explanation is. And “didn’t” and “couldn’t” are such loaded words! People of an absolutist bent do not easily accept concepts like “probably” and “possibly.”
First, they must open their minds to the POSSIBILITY that their world view is wrong. That’s a tough one by itself. Then they must try to imagine that the world MIGHT be more than six thousand years old. The time required for evolutionary processes to take place is hard enough for us to visualize. Put yourself in their shoes and try to imagine the time since “creation” to be TWO MILLION TIMES as long.
Even allowing for a “special creation” of humans (we have to ease them into this!) they have to think about mutations, which puts us into molecular biology. If they breed animals (Darwin was a pigeon fancier) they are more likely to have seen some of the genetic mechanisms in action. But you cannot get away from requiring them to think. They have had decades of conditioning AND not having to think to get beyond.
Good luck. 
The obligatory link to Talk Origin’s Problems with a Global Flood.
HUH…it evaporated?
Just to nitpick, but carbon dating is only good at measuring organic things back about 100,000 years or so, if even that far back.
OTOH, radioactive mineral deposits (with much longer half-lives than carbon-14) can be used to similarly date geological deposits.
Wildest Bill, please tell me that you at least understand the Water Cycle.
“Evaporated” does not mean “disappeared.” The water would still be in the Earth’s atmosphere.
It’s not.
Thank you for playing.
IIRC, the flood story says that the entire earth was covered. In order for that to be true, Mt. Everest would’ve had to have been underwater. Now, assuming that it wasn’t all the way under water until the very end of the 40th day, simple calculations show that water would’ve had to have been falling at the rate of .5 inches per second. That’s 1800 inches (or 150 feet) per hour. Ain’t no boat gonna stay afloat in that.
And Wildest Bill: When water evaporates, it remains in the atmosphere. If there were enough water in the atmosphere to cover the whole earth to any significant depth, we all would’ve drowned a long time ago.
Ultrafilter, please give the fundies the courtesy of not misquoting the bible. Where did you get the idea that the water level took only eight days to drop from the peak of mount Everest to present sea level? (29,035 feet divided by 150 feet per hour) I’m rusty on my Genesis but I thought they stayed in the ark for a year after the rain stopped. Still, that doesn’t excuse the remaining problems with a total global flood.
It’s not easy for a Christian to refer to Genesis as our creation myth. As the late erstwhile Lionel Hutz was fond of saying there’s the truth, and there’s the truth. I believe God revealed to Moses only what he could understand. Maybe God could have revealed the vast complexity of creation but it wouldn’t be relavent to Moses purpose in the world.
I though Robert Ballard (the dude who found the Titanic) found some evidence for this in the Black Sea (not the Ark itself but evidence for a mammoth flood).
Basically at some point the piece of land around Turkey that separated the Med from what is today the Black Sea gave way. The height difference was several hundred feet and in poured the Med filling-up the basin on the other side that ultimately became the Black Sea.
If you work from the notion that the entire earth was flooded then it seems pretty ridiculous (as has already been shown unless you say God just miracled the water in and out). However, if you work from the notion of what the Med spilling in to fill the Black Sea looked like to people back then you get a different picture. It was a monster flood by any standard and back then it sure would have seemed as if the world was flooding to the locals (the Black Sea is quite big). It is easy to see how stories of such a mammoth event would get a bit overblown in the retelling to ‘the entire earth flooded’.
I think a better attack on the Noah thing is just how he fit two of every animal onto his boat. There are thousands of animals and it would take quite a big boat to house them all not to mention the food they’d need (or did God miracle hunger out of them?).
Okay, ultrafilter wasn’t talking about how long it took for the water level to drop from the present peak of Mt. Everest to sea level, but how long it took to rise to that height–or rather, we know it took 40 days, but how much rain is that? That said, I think his math is off.
The Biblical account says that rain fell for forty days and forty nights, and “all the high mountains under the entire heavens were covered…to a depth of more than twenty feet”.
29,035 ft. + 20 ft. = 29,055 ft. = 348,660 inches
40 days = 960 hours = 57,600 minutes
In other words, rainfall equivalent to a little over 363 inches an hour, or about 6 inches a minute. (Six inches of rain a day would probably be described as “torrential”.)
Note that the Bible also talks about “the springs of the great deep burst[ing] forth”, so I guess there might have been sources for the water other than rainfall. There are still the questions of where the water came from, where it went afterwards, why there isn’t geological evidence of this, why there isn’t historical evidence of this from other civilizations, how animals like kangaroos got to the ark, how they got back home afterwards, how all the animals fit on the ark in the first place, what they ate, etc., etc., etc.
I thought that Everest was 35000 feet tall. That still doesn’t give the same answer I had (7.33… inches per minute now)–it’s been awhile since I had done the calculations, and it’s possible that I used different assumptions then.
Oh well. 6 inches per minute is still enough to put any boat down.
I think you’ve misunderstood what Ultra was talking about–his figures are for rainfall, assuming that it took the full 40 days & 40 nights to raise sea level even with the peak of Mt. Everest. Given an elevation of roughly 29,000 ft for the peak, that’s
29,000/(40*24)=30 ft/hr=0.5 ft/min of rainfall
<fiddles with conversions>
That gives us a rough average of 3.74 gallons per minute falling on every square foot of the surface of the earth. Given the Biblical dimensions of the Ark (300 cubits x 50 cubits, I believe), and taking 1 cubit=1.5 feet (which may or may not be a bit much–cubits are somewhat unreliable units), we have an Ark surface area of 33750 ft[sup]2[/sup].
That gives us
33750ft[sup]2[/sup]3.74gallons/minft[sup]2[/sup]=126225gpm
126225gpm*8.34 lbs/gallon=1052716.5 lbs/min=526.4tons/min=8.8 tons/sec of water falling on the boat.
That’s nearly nine tons of water falling on this boat every second. I can see why Ultra was dubious about it remaining afloat. For that matter, it’s somewhere in the vicinity of half a pound of water falling on the head of any human exposed to it each second–even if the impact didn’t kill you, you might very well drown in the rain.
*Note: I looked up the dimensions of the Ark and the conversion factors on the web; these values may be off a bit, but are probably fairly close. Ark dimensions were pulled from a Creationist site, FWIW.
**Further note: I see in preview that others have said some of this already–so be it, I’m not wasting my math. How much do you suppose came “bursting forth” from those springs? What kind of Ark-sinking turbulence would that cause? 
IMHO it is possible that most of the water is now locked and frozen at the polar ice caps. Some of these iceshelves are hundreds and hundres (if not thousands) of miles long and can be up to two miles thick in some areas, according to this.
Well, more or less, anyway…
Actually, they haven’t - not by themselves, anyway. Paleontologists can look at the fossils, but without a time frame, there’s nothing to indicate that these fossils weren’t created in situ (one could argue that they are the remnants of the creatures killed during the Flood). Radiometric dating provides the proper time frame. Prior to this, however, proponents of “uniformitarianism” had suggested the possibility of an old earth long before such dating techniques became available, using the logic that phenomena we observe today (such as erosion and sedimentation) would likely have operated in much the same way in the past, and that, operating over great lengths of time, they could have produced much of the geology we see today.
[aside]It is interesting to note that until relatively recently, paleontologists were trained as geologists, not bioloigsts.[/aside]
Looking only at the fossils, and assuming that they weren’t created “as is”, one can tentatively develop some geneological relationships between similar forms (also operating under the assumption that those forms found “deeper” in the rocks are older than those found above).
Only by combining aspects of geology, paleontology, biology and radiometric dating (and now, molecular biology) do we begin to get a truly clear picture of how life evolved. Looking at any one area in isolation only provides a piece of the puzzle.
All the water went to Mars.
It’s hard to prove that an omnipotent, omniscient being
didn’t do something.
He created the light that appeared to be coming from
10+ billion light years away, 4,000 years ago, 4,000 light
years away.
It strikes me that, given that genetic mutation occurs,
evolution is an inescapable consequence. However, it’s
tough to prove that an omnipotent being didn’t create all
the fossils, and animals in their state 4,000 years ago,
and that evolution will only happen slowly starting now.
Maybe you could appeal to your fundie friends to at least
examine religion vs. science’s track records. Science
admits that it’s an ongoing process of testing hypotheses,
and has created lots of great inventions. Religion claims
to be a Truth for all time-space, yet has to, every once in
a while, admit that it used to be wrong about something.
Even stuff that was written by infallible hand.
I recall reading about the Black Sea findings, and that the stories at the time talked of the flooding in that localized area.
One thing that has always interested me is the fact that so many cultures have stories and myths that involve major floods. Of course this doesn’t mean that there was a global flood, but it does seem to show that back in the day the same things interested widely dispersed groups of people.
I think Bup said it well. You’ll get nowhere trying to argue physical science to what is essentially a philosophical/theological argument. Occam’s razor is misapplied as much as the second law of thermodynamics. The simplest explanation isn’t always the correct one, just often the most likely.